My Teaching Philosophy…

My teaching philosophy is simple. Music is like food. You need to eat a balanced diet to grow to your potential. All great teachers focus on these three areas to create a complete program for any level musician. Yes, drummers ARE musicians and need to study like any other instrumentalist.

1) Protein is technique. Without proper grip and angle, the student will get to a point where they will have to rebuild everything to move on the next step or worse yet, suffer repeated stress or strain type of injuries. Studying the 40 essential rudiments and the stroke types involved with creating them are also required.

2) Vegetables are music theory. Music is a language and you have to be literate. Minimally, basic reading and theory are taught enough to pick up any music magazine or school percussion part and understand it. I encourage all my students to reach the highest level of reading. Some even reach professional Jazz, band and orchestra pieces while still in High school.

3) Dessert is playing music. Learning to play the drum part to a favorite or classic song, patterns or ‘grooves” of new styles out of a book and playing to recordings are an important part of any musicians training.

There ya’ go… a healthy diet to becoming a great drummer. The goal of any great teacher is to touch on technique, theory and music about one third of each the lesson taught. Beware! There are a lot of dessert teachers out there where the whole lesson plan is to let you play along to your favorite music. Sadly, we all know what would happen if we only ate dessert! It would be fun but not very healthy.